A Battle With Our Blood
Commentary on Tatiana Schlossberg’s New Yorker piece, “A Battle With My Blood”
It strikes me often how perverse it is to learn someone’s story a moment too late. The idea is dramatized most famously in Meet Joe Black: Brad Pitt and Claire Forlani share a spark—one of those impossible, cinematic recognitions—seconds before he is struck by a taxi and killed. In life, it doesn’t happen with such choreography. It happens quietly. A phone call about an opportunity one day becomes a phone call about grief the next. A name we hear in passing one week becomes a eulogy the week after.
Tatiana Schlossberg’s story in The New Yorker (“A Battle With My Blood,” November 22, 2025) sits squarely in that space between the cinematic and the personal: the recognition that arrives too late, the sorrow that arrives too soon.
Her piece returned me to childlike thinking—the kind of moral framework that splits the world into good guys and bad guys. When I read stories like hers, something naïve in me wishes disease functioned like a vigilante, singling out villains to make the world a bit more just. If cancer only punished the people who deserve punishment, maybe the journey for the rest of us would be easier.
But of course that’s a fantasy. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re good or bad. It doesn’t care what your name is. It doesn’t even care how healthy you are. You can do everything right—kale smoothies, relentless exercise, iron will. Cancer does not give a damn. It takes the young and it takes the old. Schlossberg once swam three miles across the Hudson to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Cancer didn’t care about that either. It keeps no karmic savings account for you to withdraw from when you need mercy.
The most devastating part of her piece comes when she considers the future she will not have: the husband she adores, the children she will not raise into memory. Her son may recall fragments of her. Her newborn daughter will remember nothing at all.
She walks us through the entire agonizing terrain—the chemo, the hair loss, the fragile hope of transplants, the daily effort to stay present even though, as she writes, it’s “harder than it sounds.” And then she turns outward, widening the frame to what the Trump administration’s cuts to medical research will mean not just for her, but for all of us. Leukemia is not fought with wishful thinking. It is fought with science, with mRNA platforms, with ocean research that once drew cytarabine from a Caribbean sponge. These things are not abstractions. They are lifelines.
What shocked me most was not the political betrayal, though that would have been more than enough. It was the personal one. The nation’s Health and Human Services secretary is her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a man who has spent decades undermining trust in the medical and scientific institutions upon which her life quite literally depends. She does not shame him outright. She doesn’t have to. The juxtaposition is its own tragic indictment: a woman fighting for her life with clarity and courage, while a man in Washington wages a culture war against truth itself.
By the time I finished the piece—a few minutes at most—I sat with the weight of what it means for her children, but also for all the children who lose parents every day. Not just to cancer, but to war, to domestic violence, to preventable disease, to accidents, to despair. None of them deserves it. Good guys and bad guys all die. We are all dying. Short of suicide or euthanasia, none of us chooses the when, the how, or the where.
But what we can choose is what we care about while we live. That is the backbone of Schlossberg’s essay: the insistence that her story is not just about her. It is about the family she leaves behind and the humanity she is still trying to protect. It is about the consequences of believing in conspiracy instead of science, of cutting the research that saves lives, of dismissing the fragile systems that tether us to one another.
In the process of dying, Schlossberg reminds us of something essential: our shared stakes, our shared breath, our shared consequences. We live in the same air, on the same planet, within the same vulnerabilities. And what happens to any one of us—what is taken from any family—echoes outward.
This is not just her battle with her blood. It is ours.